


taken by force

by josiebelladonna, nirvhannahcornell (josiebelladonna), xtinamoon (josiebelladonna)



Series: joeyrotica [13]
Category: Anthrax (US Band), Bandom
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Art, Depression, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Men Crying, References to Depression, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:48:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22899778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/josiebelladonna, https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/nirvhannahcornell, https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/xtinamoon
Summary: The continuation of "Johannesburg"/nightshade one shots. After Joey and Hannah took a break due to their careers getting in the way, they have rekindled their relationship yet again but for a much more grave reason.
Relationships: Joey Belladonna/Original Female Character
Series: joeyrotica [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1539070





	taken by force

**Author's Note:**

> Christened after his song Taken by Force, a song which, along with his other songs Last Call and Down and Out, I put right up there with Rhyme & Reason by Dave Matthews, Shoot Me Again by Metallica, I Hate Myself and Want to Die by Nirvana, Get Born Again by Alice in Chains, Let Me Drown by Soundgarden, World Coming Down by Type O Negative, and listen before i go by Billie Eilish in terms of how much I just want to cry my fucking eyes out for him.
> 
> The reason why I'm using a different pseud is because Christina Moon (from a skeleton in the closet!) represents the frightened good friend in me that reaches out to her friend in a time of dire need.

_May, 1992. Rochester, New York_.  
I had just returned home from the gallery when I spotted the light on the answering machine blinking at me. I set down my purse on the top of the chair near the door, and then I ambled over to the small white box resting on the table underneath the lamp. I pressed the button.  
"You have one new message." There was a low beep followed by that soft low voice I had known for years, the one that took me back to that evening in the gallery in the Bronx with the tape recorder:  
"Hannah, it's Joey. I need to speak to you. Something... something horrible happened."  
That was all there was to it.  
The break and drain in his voice. The odd, off-kilter tone within there.  
A weird vulnerable side I had never heard before with him, but I could assume what happened even as I took my seat there and dialed his number.  
Usually, he picked up after two rings, but he picked up before the first ring stopped.  
"Hi," I greeted him with a slight worried tone to my voice and the feeling of my heart pounding inside my chest. "Is—everything okay?"  
He sniffled.  
"Joey?" I asked him, staring down at the floor in front of me. My hand started to shake from worry that maybe one of his parents died, or something happened to him. "Joey. What happened?"  
"I got fired," he said in a low, almost ghostly voice.  
"NO!" I cried out, my voice echoing over the floor in front of me.  
"Yeah. I did."  
"Fuck—when?!"  
"About a month ago," he continued, his voice breaking. "I just—haven't been able to talk about it. I couldn't talk about it..." His voice dropped off into a light, anguished whimper. I brought a hand to my mouth to keep myself from screaming, or from puking right there on the carpet.  
"I also just wanted to hear your voice again," he whispered, and I knew he was crying right then. And I was crying: my eyes burned with tears.  
I was crying for my boy.  
"Hannah, I want you to do me a favor," he said with a mouthful of tears. "If it's not too much to ask."  
"Yes?" I lowered my hand to whisper to him. "Yes! I'll do it for you, Joey. I'll do anything for you, baby."  
He sniffled and I could picture him laying there on his couch with a box of tissues next to him. I could sense it. I knew what he was thinking but I needed to listen because I was all he had.  
"I need you... I need you to have sex with me." He sniffled and his voice tightened into a delicate whimper: "I know that's fucking horrible, and the last thing I should ask of you, but I need it. I need it so fucking bad that I can't hardly contain myself. I want you to have sex with me. Please. I want it. I need it. I'm all alone here at my place and I can't stand it. I'm gonna fucking lose it and wither and die if I don't. Please touch me. Touch me, hold me, feel me—love me. Hannah Christine, I miss you. I miss you so much! And then God fucking damn it all straight to hell, this happened and I just—" His voice broke.  
"Joey—Joey, listen to me," I said to him in a gentle but firm voice.  
He fetched up a hurt sigh and sniffled again. I flashed back on all the days we hung out at the quiet place. All the days we huddled behind the bushes together and shared each other's secrets, and then there was that day on the week before my birthday where we slept there and shared each other's secrets again. He was my best friend. My little Injun boy holding the shambles of his heart all alone, but there was no way I could let it happen again.  
He was home to me: I thought back to when we slept together in the quiet place and I woke up with my head rested upon his chest.  
He was home and now my home, his beautiful body, his huge heart, had broken into pieces. I had to fix it.  
The gallery could wait.  
"Don't move. I'll be right over. Just stay there and hold tight for an hour. I'll be right there."  
He sniffled again and that was when I hung up the phone. I scooped up my purse, and fished out the keys, and returned back out to this warm spring day in upstate New York.  
I returned to my car, where I had some paints and a pair of clean canvases in the back seat, but they could wait; I drove that hour-long commute along the edge of the lake back home to Oswego.  
It had felt like forever and a day since I had driven this way, given I was so busy with art and traveling, and he had his career with Anthrax. But this came a shock: I had to find out what happened and maybe have a word or two with Scott.  
I remembered the way to his apartment near the water, the complex with that lush planter outside. I took the spot in the garage closest to the walkway.  
I remembered his number.  
I walked up to his doorstep and knocked on the panel three times. I heard some shuffling on the inside there, which was then followed by the door opening.  
The handsome, sun-kissed face with those earthy, soft brown eyes I remembered from my school days and again after we re-lit things had been replaced by swollen, raw skin making up his now gaunt cheekbones, trembling dark lips, and angry reddened whites lined with tears. An odd funk escaped the apartment, like he hadn't bathed or cleaned the place in quite some time. He had a pair of suspicious looking, scabbed over slits on his right wrist.  
"I'm," I began, eyeing his bare, quivering legs: he only wore his black hockey shorts and an old tattered shirt that looked as though it hadn't ever been washed; "afraid to ask."  
"Come on in," he beckoned me, closing his eyes and bowing his head; his voice was a gentle but broken whisper, as if all he had done lately was weep his eyes out.  
I stepped inside the dark front room and grimaced at that persistent funk.  
"Something stinks in here," I complained.  
"It's me. Sorry. I haven't taken a shower since Sunday." He sank down on his small, shabby couch with his legs spread open. I noticed the heavy looking Indian blanket covering the window behind him.  
"God, it's so dark in here," I remarked. "If we open the curtain here and let some sun in, maybe we can shine some light on this." I set my purse down on his coffee table and then stepped behind the couch to push the blanket back from the window. But instead of pushing it back, it fell right onto the back of the couch. Joey bowed his head and covered his eyes upon the arrival of the bright, warm sunlight. I opened the window to let the room air out.  
I took a knee there on the couch cushion next to him: he lifted his head to look right at me. Aside from the tears brimming his eyes, he looked as though he had aged twenty years. His lovely, soft skin looked tired and weary, especially around his eyes.  
"You've got dark circles," I declared, straightening myself right next to him.  
"I haven't been sleeping," he confessed with his voice still soft. "I got some melatonin on my nightstand right now. I literally have not been sleeping. I wake up a lot and I can't get comfortable."  
He knitted his knees together and folded his arms around his gorgeous tummy.  
"Everything hurts," he confessed. I gaped at him. I had seen friends get fired from art galleries and granted, they took it horribly, but this was on a whole new level.  
Something on the coffee table caught my eye. I turned to look at a notepad laying there on the edge as if he had taken a note to himself. His penmanship was messy and scratchy, but I could read it:  
"'Tossing and turning in my bed—it's a miracle I'm not dead.'"  
I looked up at him. "Did you write this?"  
"I've been trying to get out my feelings lyrically, you know?" he admitted, keeping his arms over his waist. "Just this past month alone. But I'm no artist like you are, though. My poetry feels like I'm bullshitting my way through a paper."  
"Just this past month alone, you've fallen this far," I said in a soft voice. He sniffled and nodded his head.  
"Can I tell you something? I haven't told my parents this."  
"That's why I'm here," I gently told him, resting a hand on his knobbly knee. "We restarted things by talking. We can do it again. You can tell me anything, Joey."  
He nibbled on his bottom lip.  
"I was about ready to kill myself," he confessed. "You see that knife right there?" He gestured to a large silver kitchen knife resting on the coffee table in front of us: the blade must have been the size of a stick of butter.  
"Yeah?"  
"I was gonna put it to my throat last night, and then I decided it was too much. You see my belt right there next to it?"  
There was a smooth looking black leather belt coiled up right next to the blade.   
"Yeah?"  
"When I got up this morning, I was gonna tie it around my neck and hang myself. I was gonna wear these shorts and this shirt because who the hell cares if I looked nice. My corpse was gonna rot on the kitchen floor anyways. The one memento would be my hockey shorts. And then I looked over at the phone and thought of you. I thought of you and I thought of how you would react to my suffocating and no one knowing it. You were the last thing on my mind."  
"Joey—" I gasped and brought a hand to my mouth again. My best friend, my beautiful friend, thought of such horrible things and yet, here he was, still sitting next to me with his handsome face broken and stained with tears, and his gorgeous hair an untamed, unwashed, disheveled mess. He shook his head: his bottom lip trembled and the tears filled his eyes once more.  
"I've just..." he sputtered, "I've just been such a mess right now. I don't want to feel anymore."  
I huddled closer to him: even though he hadn't washed his hair in a week, his neck still smelled of that soft cologne he always wore, the one I loved no less.  
"What in _the hell_ were Scott and Charlie thinking?" I stammered.  
"I don't have any idea," he confessed, brushing away a tear. "I don't have any fucking idea, Hannah, babe. Scott's going through a divorce right now and Charlie's just as lost as any of us."  
"Ohhhhhhh," I figured it out right there, but at the same time, it made no sense.  
Why, of all people, throw Joey under the bus like that? Maybe it was done on impulse and maybe neither of them had any idea what to do other than act from the seats of their pants. But at the moment, the tears brimming Joey's big brown eyes were enough to beckon me into putting my arms around him. I held him close.  
"My poor baby—come to me, baby." He lay his head into my shoulder and bawled right into my jacket. "Come here, baby. It's okay, I'll take care of you—" I kissed him on the crown of his head and got a mouthful of ringlets but I didn't mind. Betrayed by his band mates for things beyond their control and he had no other means to cope other than to fall and wallow in his own pain. My best friend on the brink and needing a sense of soft touch to help heal these angry, deep wounds on his heart and his mind.  
"I wanna fucking die," he wept into my shoulder. "I just wanna lay down on the ground and die."  
"I don't want you to!" I cried out. "If you die, who am I gonna call when it's a slow night? Who am I gonna make sweet love to when the moment is right? And also—"  
I held onto the sides of his face to look right into those big brown irises, shroud with tears.  
"What am I gonna tell your parents?" I demanded, feeling the tears run down my face. "What am I gonna tell your mom and dad that their son—and my boyfriend—hanged himself with his own belt? Who the fuck am I—"  
I held his face close to mine. I pressed my lips onto his. I missed the way he tasted, his softness, the way he felt in my hands. I missed his feeling, and there was no way I would let him slip away from me like this. I let go of his lips and gazed into his eyes.  
"Who the fuck am I gonna kiss again?" I whispered into his face. His bottom lip trembled. I wasn't angry, and I knew he wasn't, and neither of us could be angry or point fingers. But the damage was done: I needed to get off of this break and help him heal before he went further down on this downward spiral. I needed to get him out of this funk and back into the daylight again.  
"Come to Mama, baby," I whispered to him.  
"Come to Mama," he echoed with another sniffle and a slight chuckle.  
"Come to Mama," I repeated in a gentle voice. I brushed back a lock of his black hair from his face. "Come to Mama. Go get yourself cleaned up for me and then we'll have a little fun here on the couch. We'll have a little fun in our quiet place again. Okay?"  
"Yeah, yeah," he whispered, sniffling again and nodding his head. "I'll do it. Anything for you. Anything for the only girl I've ever loved."  
"I love you," I whispered into his face. "My best friend."  
"I love you, too. Even if it kills me."  
I giggled and stroked the sides of his face.  
"What do you wanna do?" he asked me, his eyes still filled with tears.  
"I was thinking... when you get out of the shower, don't put your clothes back on. I have a couple of canvases in the back seat of my car. When you're washed down, I wanna paint you. I've been missing your body and the way you feel to me. And then we'll do it."  
"Sounds good by me," he confessed, his voice breaking once again, but I knew it was from happiness.

**Author's Note:**

> Drawing by me 💜


End file.
